Vermont Slauson Development Corp

After more than a quarter-century of struggle to nurture small businesses in the challenging environment of South Los Angeles, Marva Smith Battle-Bey received national recognition for her efforts Monday when the Small Business Administration honored her as its 2007 National Minority Small Business Champion. Battle-Bey, president and chief executive of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit she has headed since 1981, credited her organization's track record for the award.

After more than a quarter-century of struggle to nurture small businesses in the challenging environment of South Los Angeles, Marva Smith Battle-Bey received national recognition for her efforts Monday when the Small Business Administration honored her as its 2007 National Minority Small Business Champion. Battle-Bey, president and chief executive of the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit she has headed since 1981, credited her organization's track record for the award.

An affordable-housing development opened last week in South-Central Los Angeles. Central Avenue Villa, a 20-unit apartment complex at 4051 S. Central Ave., is the first of two such projects in the neighborhood built by the Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp., a community-based, nonprofit housing and business developer.

The Pacific Asian Consortium in Employment (PACE) and the Vermont Slauson Development Corp. are among seven organizations statewide that have received grants to offer technical assistance to small businesses whose owners are low-income, minority, disabled or women. The $350,000 grant from Wells Fargo Bank will be divided among the organizations as part of an initiative to help entrepreneurs raise their chances of success.

The Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp. is offering rehabilitation loans to owners of rental property willing to take part in the Los Angeles City Housing Authority's "Section 8" housing-assistance payments program. Landlords can borrow up to $100,000 at a 10% fixed interest rate.

Nearly two and a half years ago, Diana McDade, James Seaward and Dennis McClendon were standing in unemployment lines. Now McDade, Seaward and McClendon own Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlors in South Central Los Angeles thanks to an unusual joint program between the city of Los Angeles and Glendale-based Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream Co., the world's largest franchiser of ice cream dipping stores.

Ten years after rioters torched shops on the site, a growing Mexican supermarket chain broke ground Monday on a store to anchor a $10-million shopping center in South-Central Los Angeles. Efforts to rebuild the shopping center at Vermont and Slauson avenues had been plagued by false starts, with Vons and ValuePlus supermarkets pulling out of development plans. In 1998, Rocky Delgadillo, then Los Angeles deputy mayor for economic development, suggested bringing the Gigante supermarket chain to the site.

With the help of a $25,000 grant, a Los Angeles economic development agency plans to turn a former pharmaceuticals company into a training and "incubator" facility for fledgling local businesses. First Interstate Bank recently awarded the grant to the Vermont-Slauson Economic Development Corp. to help fund the make-over of a 10,000-square-foot industrial building at 6109 S. Western Ave.

Two Los Angeles-based teams are among three finalists named to design and build a $15-million development expected to be the largest single private investment along Vermont Avenue in decades. The developers are Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corp. and the Barker Pacific Group. They are competing with Caleb Development and related companies, a partnership that includes the architects Solomon Inc.

MARVA SMITH BATTLE-BEY heads the Vermont-Slauson Economic Development Corp., a nonprofit organization based in South-Central Los Angeles. The corporation's achievements include putting together the deal that built the Vermont-Slauson shopping center, which opened in 1981. Battle-Bey took over the organization 16 years ago after working in the city's office of economic development under Mayor Tom Bradley.

An investment fund providing an initial $24 million toward the financing of supermarket-anchored retail centers in poor, underserved areas of Los Angeles and 13 other cities is to be announced today by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros.